More and more people are discovering the delights of traveling without having to stay in a chain hotel, especially with the current rise in popularity of Airbnb. Hotels have reacted by trying to keep up with the changing times by developing new offers and perks for online marketers who prefer to promote brands through social media rather than by ringing bells and flashing lights.
Why Are People Choosing to Stay at Hotels Instead of Airbnb?
Airbnb has completely altered travel as we know it. Gone are the days when you would check into a chain hotel and feel pampered and catered to by housekeeping who brought you dinner and made your bed extremely comfortable. People are now choosing to stay at Airbnb because they want to meet new people and make their vacation experience an immersive one. Hotels are also responding by changing their approaches to attract these new guests. The most effective way forward for a hotel is to partner with an online marketing agency to drive traffic to their website and social media channels.
Why should you consider partnering with an agency? Well, it’s simple. You’re a hotel, you want to sell rooms, right? An agency will approach this from a digital marketing perspective and help you identify the best ways to connect with your audience on a 24/7 basis.
Hotel Marketing Checklist
Before you begin your marketing journey, it’s important to familiarize yourself with some key metrics that your hotel management team will appreciate. Below, you’ll find a short checklist of the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you should consider tracking. Make sure to put a flag in the column next to each KPI to monitor their progress.
Unique Visitors
The number of people who arrive at your site through a single channel (e.g. Google, Facebook, or Twitter) over a given time period. This is a good indicator of the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy. If you’ve been investing in paid advertisements on social media, you’ll want to make sure that these are bringing in the unique visitors that you’re looking for. You can use tools like Google Analytics to track the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Sessions
Your sessions represent the number of times that a user visits your site and then leaves again without making a purchase. The more sessions you have, the more people are discovering your hotel and potentially becoming customers. If you’re looking to gain new customers, you should consider boosting your website’s SEO using proven methods like content marketing and link building. The more channels that your campaigns appear on, the greater the chances of someone visiting your site. For example, if you’ve run a Facebook campaign and it appears alongside SEO-optimized content on a blog, you’re increasing the odds of someone clicking on that content instead of the Facebook advertisement. One of the most effective ways of gaining new customers is through social media, where you can engage with your audience and encourage them to share your content. This also improves your conversion rate and allows you to target the right audience for your hotel.
Conversions
Your conversions represent the number of people who’ve decided that your hotel is the best place to make a purchase after visiting your site. To do this, you’ll need to create a shopping cart mechanism on your website and then follow up with paid advertising and SEO to drive traffic to it. You can use tools like Google Analytics to track the effectiveness of your campaigns and identify the types of visitors who are most likely to convert. You can also implement A/B testing to see which approach (e.g. display of product images or text-based description) is most effective for converting traffic.
Cost Per Conversion
This is the cost per conversion, or simply how much it cost you to generate a single conversion. To calculate this, you need to multiply the cost of the conversion by the number of conversions you get in a given period. For example, if you spent £100 on a PPC campaign and got a 600% conversion rate, your cost per conversion would be £100 x 600 = £6000. You should look at this metric to determine whether or not the return on your investment in paid ads is justified. If you’re not seeing the results you want, then you might want to re-evaluate your strategy and consider alternative forms of marketing. Things like social media marketing and content marketing can be extremely cost-effective and have the potential to generate millions of impressions and traffic to your website without the need for expensive ads.
How to Partner with an Agency
Whether you’re experienced in marketing or simply want to try something new, partnering with an agency is an effective way to generate new customers and exposure. It’s always a good idea to partner with an agency that’s based in the U.S. so you can take advantage of the country’s stringent privacy regulations. An agency can also help set up your Google Analytics account so you don’t have to worry about setting this up yourself. Analytics will automatically track your hotel’s performance and provide you with important data about your hotel’s web traffic.
If you want to partner with an agency, then you need to consider what you want to get out of the arrangement. Do you want to generate more sales? Do you want to increase your hotel’s profile on social media? Or do you just want to get more people to discover your hotel and ideally make a booking? These are all important questions and it’s good to have a clear idea of what you want before you begin discussing terms with an agency.
An Agency’s Role
An agency’s role depends on what you want out of the partnership. If you’re looking to generate more sales, then the role of the agency is to drive traffic to your hotel’s website and social media. They will implement a content marketing strategy and run PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns on Google and other search engines. If you want to increase your hotel’s social media presence, then the role of the agency is to manage your accounts and build your audience. They will engage with potential customers on your behalf and help you drive traffic to your website from social media.
If you’re looking to partner with an agency, then it’s important to remember that not all of them are created equal. It’s important to find an agency that you can trust and that has the skills and experience to improve your hotel’s web traffic and conversion rates. If you don’t want to put your hotel’s financial information in the hands of an outside agency, then make sure to work with a highly reputable company with experience in hotel marketing.